Tag: MVP

Using PowerShell to manage your Microsoft cloud services like Exchange Online and using multi-factor authentication (MFA) separately is awesome. Using the two together however, not so much. Microsoft documentation on this topic seems to suggest that all the required administrative tasks needed are to be performed from a shell that launched separately from the PowerShell…

Microsoft’s Azure Key Vault manages cryptographic keys and certificates used by cloud applications and services. Some instances may require the use of said certificate stored in Azure Key Vault on a computer, or some hosted service. Use of PowerShell is the quickest way to accomplish this via the following steps: With the Azure PowerShell tools…

Using site-to-site VPN gateway can provide better continuity for your workloads in hybrid cloud setup with Azure. This post will demonstrate how to set up site-to-site VPN Gateway to enable this. Requirements Before start make sure you have following in place. 1) VPN device: A VPN device is needed on-premise to create the VPN connection with…

When working with the ActiveDirectory PowerShell module, the -filter parameter is sometimes required to search for accounts or objects in Active Directory. Utilization of variables in those filters may also be required to return a needed value. As an example, running the following command from the remote Exchange management shell returns an object that includes…

With Windows server 2016 was released for public (GA), many businesses are working on migrating their services to the new offering. This post will walk you through the steps needed to migrate Active Directory FSMO roles running on Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016 Active Directory. The same steps are valid for migrating…

Did you know you can detect if a string ends in a specific character, or if it starts in one in PowerShell? This can be doe easily with the use of regular expressions or more simply know as Regex. Consider the following examples: ‘something\’ -match ‘.+?\\$’ #returns true ‘something’ -match ‘.+?\\$’ #returns false ‘\something’ -match…

Active directory, from a security perspective, is one of the more impactful services within an organization. Even small changes in Organization’s AD can cause a major business impact. Preventing any unauthorized access and unplanned changes in an AD environment should be top of mind for any system administrator. Should changes or unauthorized access happen within your AD environment, would you have enough…

Recently I fielded the following PowerShell question: “How do I make sure a variable, which is an int, is of a certain length?” Turns out it’s not too hard as the solution simply requires the use of a little regex. Consider the following example: [int]$v6 = 849032 [int]$v2 = 23 $v6 -match ‘^\d{6}$’ $v2 -match ‘^\d{6}$’…

There are interesting new features now made available in Windows Server 2016 such as time based group membership, privileged access management, and others. Most will be covered in future posts. This post will detail how to install active directory on Windows Server 2016. Before the AD install however it is important to understand what is the minimum requirement to…

IP address assignments in Azure are dynamic by default and can possibly change when a VM is restarted. Azure VMs can also be assigned static IPs. So why would you need to assign a static IP addresses to an Azure VM? 1) Application requirements – sometime applications need to connect with fixed IP address. For example, if it’s a…